


Ill Chance and Strange Fates

by TheLionInMyBed



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Adoption, Babysitting, Board Games, Cannibalism, F/F, F/M, First Kiss, Fisting, Gen, Helcaraxë, M/M, Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Object Insertion, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sauron's Sexy Conlang, Sex Toys, Silmarils, Snowball Fight, Teenage Poetry, The Most Dangerous Game, Xenophilia, autonomic self-healing elastomer matrixes, dog show au, dueling piccolos, severed hand jobs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2018-10-22 03:22:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 27
Words: 17,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10688751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLionInMyBed/pseuds/TheLionInMyBed
Summary: Short lays of sunken Beleriand, tragic and fair and fearful.(mostly fearful) (it's my tumblr fic)





	1. Maglor, Maedhros and the songs that are not sung

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Маленькие истории о Фингоне и Маэдросе от TheLionInMyBed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11270883) by [rio_abajo_rio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rio_abajo_rio/pseuds/rio_abajo_rio)
  * Translation into Русский available: [Маленькие истории об эльфах и не только от TheLionInMyBed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12699768) by [rio_abajo_rio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rio_abajo_rio/pseuds/rio_abajo_rio)



> A collection of promptfic and nonsense from [my tumblr](http://thelioninmybed.tumblr.com), stories that hopefully make some kind of sense out of the context of a hideous reply chain, but don't have enough of a theme to make it into a less disparate collection. 
> 
> (I'm gonna try to import these gradually so as not to blow up everyone's notifications, that'd be rude)
> 
> If you have a prompt of your own, feel free to hit me up.

Maglor licked his lips and tasted salt. “The King is dead.”

“Long live the King,” said Maedhros, brushing dead leaves from his map. “I suppose that’s Turgon now. It will be difficult to coordinate any resistance with him hidden away Manwë knows where.” He had not waited for them to pitch their tents but spread his papers out upon the dirt, the corners weighted with stones. Now he crouched over them, frowning as though a rout could be turned into a retreat through sheer force of concentration.

“Fingon is dead,” Maglor said again. He had been rehearsing the words to himself since he first heard the news, ensuring that he could give them the proper weight. It was not every day you told a lord his king was dead. It was not every day you told a man he had lost his lover.

It was like dropping a stone into a well only to hear no satisfying _plop_ as it struck water.

“Yes,” said Maedhros. “I heard you the first time. I’m crippled, not deaf. Do you know how many horses we have left? Make yourself useful and get me an accurate count.”

It was a little brother’s job to push. It was a bard’s job to peel back the mask, to find the ugly truth that lay beneath. “Our cousin,” Maglor said.

“And many others. Azaghâl, Haldir, Bór and all his sons, and that is counting only kings.” Maedhros frowned down at the vambrace on his right arm and began to tug at the strap that held it fast to his wrist. “We don’t know that Curufin yet lives, or Amras. Which is why I need to know the disposition of our horses.”

“He died alone.”

“So do we all. The horses, Maglor. Please.” Maedhros looked up at last. The left side of his face was still raw -

_“What happened?” Maglor had asked, voice hoarse from screaming commands and then from simply screaming._

_“There were balrogs,” Maedhros told him. He grinned and the burned skin cracked and wept._ “Were.”

\- and his eyes were grey as tarnished pewter, ash from a dead fire, clouds before they broke. Maglor would pick his favourite later, when he put the verse to paper. Now he said, “You loved him.”

Maedhros tugged at the leather again. “Do you think that matters now?”

“ _Yes_.”

“He’s dead.” Maedhros tightened the strap further. “We are not. But if you don’t cease your insubordination and tell me how many horses we have left, I’ll see to it that he doesn’t go to the Halls alone.”

Maglor pushed. “You’ve already seen to that.”

Slowly, deliberately, Maedhros let go his wrist guard. “I’m not Caranthir.”

“We both know this was not _his_ fault.”

“I meant that I’m not going to let you provoke me. Would it make a better song if I raged and wept and cursed the gods? Would it be easier for you to set this to a pretty tune and pretend it happened to someone else?”

 _Yes_. It would. 

In the songs his brother was noble, eloquent, terrible in his fury. Not a tired, terse man whose only expression was one of ironic detachment. In the songs, Maglor was Fëanor’s strong-voiced son, commander of armies, slayer of traitors, not a poet in dented armour with sore feet and a desperate need for the privy. In the songs this would be a tragedy but a tragedy that had _meaning_. All this death would make some sort of sense.

He said, “Those that come after will need to understand what happened here.”

“We lost. What more needs to be said?” Maedhros’ eyes softened just a little and he stood and came to Maglor, placing his hand upon his shoulder. “But people _will_ come after. And for their sakes, you know what you must do.”

Maglor licked his lips again. It could have been Uldor’s blood that he was tasting - that would have had a pleasing poetry to it - but he doubted it. It was just blood. “The horses.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Maedhros’ jaw clenched and twitched and for a moment Maglor thought - hoped - thought that he might weep after all. But he did not. He turned back to his map.

In the end, Maglor did not write any songs.

That was, he thought, the best tribute he could offer.


	2. Lúthien, Sauron and the dog show AU no one asked for

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't remember what the context was for a Dogshow AU. _Presumably_ there was some.

“Second place? _Second place_? This is Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s Father Of Werewolves! He’s been champion for three years running and that mangy thing-” the man’s angry gesture might have meant Huan, Lúthien or both of them “-isn’t fit to be his chewtoy.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but the judges’ decision isn’t open to debate,” said the attendant firmly. “If you keep shouting I’m going to have to have you escorted from the premises and sent quaking back to your master. There everlastingly your naked self shall endure the torment of his scorn, pierced by his eyes.”

Father Of Werewolves, a handsome blue roan with excellent confirmation and blazing yellow eyes, growled nervously and his owner silenced him with a glare and a vicious jerk of the leash. “This isn’t over,” he hissed to Lúthien. “I’ll see you at the Angband Kennel Club Show. I’m entering Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s Jaws Of Thirst and he’s twice the dog his sire is. He’s going to eat your mutt alive.”

Lúthien rolled her eyes and made a jerking off motion at the man’s retreating back. She didn’t care _how_ shiny the prizes were, what kind of asshole got this worked up over a dog show? “Fuck him,” she said to Huan, who thumped his tail in agreement. “We’re going to Angband. That Best In Show trophy is ours.”


	3. Maedhros, Fingon and a contentious glass of water

“You need to drink.”

Maedhros knew that he did but only intellectually. He had been thirstier upon the mountain but there Melkor- _Morgoth’s_ arts had kept him alive, however his heart stuttered or his lips cracked and bled. A dry mouth and a sore throat did not mean what they once had.

He needed water now. But there was something else he needed more. “No.”

“It’s not drugged, I promise. I’ll prove it-” Fingon raised the cup to his lips and took a gulp then offered it back.

Maedhros closed his eyes. “I don’t want it.”

“Will you tell me why?”

“I don’t want it,” he repeated. He sounded like a child. He was _acting_ like a child. On Fingon’s face he saw the same carefully masked frustration he’d felt often enough himself when trying persuade the twins to stop throwing food at each other or pointing out to Curufin that hiding his carrots under his napkin wasn’t fooling anyone.

“You’re being unreasonable,” Fingon said neutrally.

That was rather the point but Maedhros did not say it. He did not say anything and, finally, he heard the creak of the camp chair as Fingon rose-

_-and pressed him back onto the bed, he wasn’t strong enough to fight him, was stupid enough not to have expected the hand about his throat and the cup pressed to his lips, tipped so that he had to swallow or inhale-_

-and left the tent. Maedhros opened his eyes. The water sat upon the nightstand, within reach.

Even his right hand would have been unsteady. With his left he’d spilt half the cup before it reached his mouth and he drank it so quickly that he choked.

***

“I think it would look very fetching.”

“I’m not dying my hair.”

Fingon rearranged his face into the most appealing expression he could manage. It was, indeed, very appealing but not quite enough to make Maedhros reconsider. “I’m not suggesting that you dye _all_ of it - I like the red too well - but with some highlights it would look even-”

“No,” Maedhros said firmly.

“These dyes were a gift from one of the local Sindar settlements. I think they’ll be offended if we don’t use them.”

“Dye your own hair then.”

“I think I shall! Blond streaks to match the gold. Once you see how fine I look you’ll regret not getting yours done to match.”

“However shall I live with myself?” Maedhros rolled his eyes. “Were you always this unreasonable?”

“Oh yes,” said Fingon. “Always. More tea?”


	4. Fingon, Maedhros and a hand that should not have been lent

“Most people would settle for a lock of hair,” said Maedhros. **  
**

“Most people have a love less great than ours,” said Fingon. “This is far more romantic.”

Maedhros backed off a step. “I’m not sure the…preserving process was entirely successful. I promise I won’t be offended if you burn it. In fact, if you’ll just-” he coughed “-hand it over, I’ll do it for you.”

“No! I love you too well. I love every last piece of you.”

“You could at least give it a manicure. That’s thirty years of hangnail you’re cradling.”

“Every. Last. Piece,” Fingon said, his eyes alight with a passion that had sent orcs fleeing from the field rather than face him. “Just think, even while we’re kingdoms apart, I’ll still be able to hold your hand.” He demonstrated. “And your hand will be able to hold my-”

“Fingon _no_.”


	5. The Nolofinweans and a challenge that must be answered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Fingon, Turgon, Aredhel so on and so forth snowball fight in Helcaraxe?

Turgon stared out across the frosty tundra, cold and barren as his soul now that his beloved Elenwë had been taken from him. The better part of him had died with her but their daughter needed him yet and so he clutched Idril to his chest and marched steadily onward. **  
**

The wind howled its fury, tearing at their clothes and beside them Fingon raised his chin in stoic determination, the rage that burnt within him driving him on despite the bite of its cruel teeth.

“I wish you two would stop that,” said Aredhel around a mouthful of half-frozen seal blubber. “I know your wife’s dead and I know your boyfriend abandoned you to a death march across an icy hellscape but it’s been ten years. Haven’t you both moped long enough?”

“No!” her brothers cried.

Aredhel swallowed and rolled her eyes then picked up a handful of snow and went up on her tiptoes to drop it down Turgon’s back.

He cursed, flailed, and almost dropped Idril in his attempts to dislodge it. Fingon laughed bitterly - bitter was the only kind of laughter he allowed himself now - but it turned into spluttering when Aredhel’s first snowball struck him in the face.

Fingon being Fingon, no matter the cold and no matter the hurt he nursed, he could not let a challenge go unanswered. With a ferocious battle cry he snatched up a snowball of his own and hurled it at his sister.

Light of foot, she dodged his first strike but the second snowball struck her in the chest and knocked her from her feet. With a triumphant shout he threw a third and fourth, merciless in his victory.

Things looked grim indeed for bold Aredhel but Tugon put all the craft of the Noldor into forging missiles of lethal hardness and these he hurled at both his siblings. Crying out in pain, Fingon and Aredhel were forced to forget their animosity and dive for shelter behind a snowbank.

“The field is mine,” Turgon declared but it was then that Idril Celebrindal, fair yet faithless daughter, twisted in his arms and dropped yet more snow down his shirt.

The battle they waged was long and fierce, the staunchest of their followers racing to support their lords. Near half their host was so engaged when wise Fingolfin came to see what all the commotion was, took a snowball to the face and demanded a ceasefire.

“Well,” said Aredhel, brushing ice crystals from her hair. “Have you two stopped sulking now?”

Fingon grinned in answer and if Turgon’s expression was not one of joy it was at least less bleak.

“Two people ran out onto weak ice and fell to their deaths,” said their father. “No. More. Snowball fights.”

“So you’re saying this game…left them cold?” Aredhel said with a wry grin and Fingon and Turgon laughed with her, their woes forgotten for the moment.


	6. The Nolofinweans and a diversity of approaches to shelter construction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: I love your Fingolfin household in winter wonderland ficlet! May I request Idril and Turgon designing an igloo and Aredhel and Fingon trying to be helpful?

“What happened to our tent?” Turgon said, holding it up to display the great rents clawed into the canvas.

“Someone,” said Aredhel, “and I name no names, might have tried to net an ice bear with it.”

“You little sneak!” said Fingon, snatching up a ball of slush and grit and preparing to hurl it. “I gave you half a dried herring not to tell.”

Aredhel shrieked and ducked behind Turgon for protection. “Father said no more snowball fights!”

“This is more ice than snow. Come face your fate.”

“This,” said Turgon, ignoring them both, “is the perfect opportunity to test a design I’ve been working on."

“That _I’ve_ been working on,” said Idril.

“A design for what?” Aredhel said, still wary. “Are you going to make a new tent out of snow?”

“Yes.” Turgon snatched Fingon’s iceball from his hand and cast it aside.

Fingon frowned. It had been a good iceball, refrozen to near the hardness of stone and studded with deadly pebbles. “So do we pile up snow then dig out the middle?”

“Not just any snow,” said Turgon. “For the optimum compaction of ice crystals-”

“Snow is snow,” said his sister and dropped a load upon his boots.

Fingon, forgetting that there were no snippy redheads to impress, topped it with an even larger pile of his own. “Tell us when to stop.”

“You can’t dump it like that!” said Idril. “I’ve done the calculations and we need to make a catenoid; it offers the optimum ratios of height and diameter to eliminate the stresses which could cause buckling. Such forces as there are will be compressive, strengthening the structure.”

Turgon wiped away a tear of pride before it could freeze. Fingon and Aredhel, too absorbed in seeing who could make the biggest snow mound, ignored her.

Luckily they got bored before Turgon was buried deeper than his waist and wandered off to find another bear to fight.

If they had stayed they might have appreciated the grueling labour father and daughter put into their project; the frozen, blistered hands; the feverish architectural calculations adapted on the fly; the carefully formed blocks of windblown snow cut out to form foundations or the sheets of clear ice used to let in light. They might have seen the joy of creation light up Idril’s tired young face or wipe the sadness from Turgon’s features, if only for an hour.

When brother and sister did return, dragging a bear corpse in their wake, it was to find the igloo finished; a neat little dome giving off a cheery glow of firelight.

Aredhel kicked it to assess the structural integrity and Fingon climbed up upon the roof and jumped once or twice. Nothing happened.

“It’s a bit small,” said Aredhel dubiously.

Turgon stuck his head out. “It’s cozy. The perfect size for the two of us.”

“Oh so that’s how it’s going to be?” Aredhel stamped her booted feet. “Enjoy your freezing snow hovel. Fingon and I have already arranged for superior accommodation.”

“Can we not apologise?” said Fingon. The igloo did indeed look very snug.

“Why should we? Why _would_ we when we have this dead bear to sleep in?”

Fingon conceded the point. Once you grew used to the smell and the seeping moistness of miscellaneous fluids, the bear’s innards were warm and soft. Aredhel’s snoring was annoying but had been equally so within the tent, and they would not even have to leave their bed for breakfast. All in all Fingon thought that they had improvised excellently, showing exactly the kind of initiative their father expected of them.

* * *

“No,” said Fingolfin, scarf wrapped around his face to keep out the cold and the lingering stink of viscera.

“But-”

“No. More. Bears.”


	7. Fingon, Maedhros and it's on the tip of my tongue

The worst part was, Fingon didn’t think Maedhros knew he was doing it. **  
**

In staid, official Sindarin, Maedhros was smooth and sardonic and said whatever he thought Fingon most wanted to hear. Behind closed doors, in the Quenya of their childhood, he was less polished, more honest and thus less inclined to speak at all.

It was only very rarely, when Maedhros was lost in the fog of battle, or when Fingon had coaxed him into utterly forgetting himself, that he spoke a different language and Fingon did not then know what he said.

Curses, perhaps, or pleas. In the Enemy’s Black Speech the two sounded much the same. The words were ugly, misshapen things, as was all that came from Angband, and any sane person would have been horrified to hear them spoken.

Perhaps Fingon was not sane then, for the sound of Maedhros’ voice in his ear, roughened by need, choking out those filthy, awful syllables sent shudders running through him that were only partly horror.

He told himself that it was because his friend had suffered and survived. Every word was another victory stolen from the enemy.

He told himself it was because he was Fingon the Valiant who had battled Ice and dragons; it was only natural he should be thrilled by the things that others feared.

All of that was true and, were he Maedhros, he would leave it there. But it was not the whole truth. The whole truth was that those words, the naked desperation as he moaned them, were the most honesty Fingon would ever get from him.

So no. The worst part was not that Maedhros did not realise. The worst part was that Fingon liked it.


	8. Maglor, Daeron and the blowing of one's own horn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: dueling piccolos + maglor + foreplay + hat = how's that for #provocative PS i am an anon
> 
> (it's not a very good anon if June _tells_ it's her, but no matter)

“It just feels,” said Maglor, “like no one is really listening to me”

“Amras, darling brother, sweet child, put that down right n- _No don’t put it in your mouth!_ ”

“They hear the music, yes, but only in the shallowest sense. They might as well be listening to birdsong for all the meaning they take from it.”

“Spit it out, Amras. I’m not taking you to Estë again so if you get sick you’re going to have to go to Mandos and won’t that be fun? Oh, it won’t? No, don’t cry, just spit it out, into my han- _ugh_. Alright. Good boy.”

Aware that his audience was not as attentive as it ought to be, Maglor sharpened his voice. “But I suppose that, when even my so-called family can’t take a moment to commiserate with my artistic struggles, it would be foolish to expect understanding from the unwashed masses.”

Maedhros looked up from his handful of half-chewed caterpillar. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“Plebeian,” said Maglor and stalked off.

* * *

“You understand me,” Maglor whispered, caressing the sinuous curves and elegant knobs of his piccolo.

He raised it to his lips, the polished wood warm beneath his fingers, and blew.

The solo melody he played was lilting and languorous, his fingers drifting gently over the keys with the ease of long familiarity. Slowly he increased the tempo, thrills running through him, tension coiling in his chest until the piece climaxed in a burst of bright, joyful sound. Panting and replete, Maglor let go his instrument and lay back upon the green glass of Valinor.

He would clean the fluids from the spit valve later.

* * *

“She just walked up to me and asked me if I could play _Elmendaramba_ , like I was some common bard piping tunes in a tavern.”

“-But if you placed the tower here, you could run a boom chain across to here-” Maedhros tapped the map before him. His prosthesis was chased with silver, worn in honour of the Mereth Aderthad, and it shone coolly in the starlight. “-letting you control all access to the harbour mouth.”

Círdan pursed his lips. “Of course I’ve considered it but a chain that long simply isn’t feasible. Or hasn’t been until now. Could your people-?”

“Of course I can play it, but I’m an artist, not some songbird caged for her amusement!”

“Yes,” said Maedhros firmly and rather more loudly than Maglor thought was warranted.

“You sound very certain, Scion of Finwë.”

“Who asks for Elmendaramba anyway? An orc could play that upon a flute shoved up its arse.”

Maedhros smiled, a little desperately. “He may doubt our motives and our morals but not even Thingol doubts our skill.”

Though Círdan smiled in return, it did not quite reach his eyes. “When can you have it done?”

“I must consult our smiths but say before next autumn’s storms.”

“And payment?”

“If they’d requested real music - say the Noldolantë - I might have obliged.”

“My brother is a sensitive, artistic soul and such base matters are beneath him,” Maedhros said. His voice was very tight. “Perhaps he would like to leave so that we might discuss it privately.”

“Plebeians,” Maglor said and went in search of more enlightened company.

* * *

Now that night had fallen, a cold wind blew, sending ripples across the Pools of Ivrin and almost snatching Maglor’s hat from his head. He tugged it back on and straightened the elegant plumes that adorned it. When the High King had first proposed the Feast of Reuniting, he had implied a that it would be a celebration of all that they had achieved since coming to Beleriand with food and drink, games and revelry and, most importantly, music. In actuality it was little more than a glorified war council. His uncle was in his element and his brother seemed relieved that no one expected him to have fun - even Finrod and his siblings, usually so merry, had decided to put playing at politics over the playing of harps.

His reverie was interrupted when a voice, sweet and tuneful for all that it was raised in ire, rang out across the water. Maglor resisted the urge to turn and look.

“-care what you say, there can never be enough songs about Lúthien’s beauty!”

“Daeron, please,” said a second voice, rougher and thus less interesting. “We’re here to represent the interests of our kindom not wax lyrical about the- the twilit stormclouds of her hair.”

“So you were listening.”

“At that volume you left me little choice. Look, there’s one of those awful Fëanorians. Why don’t you go over there and…discuss runes with him? They’re supposed to like those too.”

“Fine, I shall. But do not expect me to enjoy it. What a miserable party this has turned out to be.” Booted feet squelched through the damp grass down to the water’s edge. “Hail and well met, Fëanorian.”

Maglor turned to face his greatest rival in all of Arda, a bard and scholar said to be without compare, inventor of the cirth, master of all instruments and verse. He was shorter than Maglor had expected but wore a hat of his own that more than made up for his deficiency in height - it was decorated with wildflowers and a perch upon which several live nightingales sat and trilled in concert. “Good evening to you, Daeron of Doriath,” Maglor said, cool and unintimidated. 

“Which one are you then?” said Daeron with a challenging smirk. He was not handsome but his insouciant smile made up much of the deficiency. 

“They say you are a scholar and a wit; why don’t you tell me?”

“You are not tall nor dark nor fair. Curufin then, or Maglor.”

“I’m holding a piccolo,” said Maglor helpfully.

“One that you just fashioned?”

“No.”

“Well that narrows things down. Tell me, what do you think of Lúthien, fairest of all the Children of Ilúvatar?” Daeron’s eyes did not burn with Treelight but they shone bright with welling emotion.

“Alas, I have never had the pleasure.” An image of Maedhros, glaring slightly more than usual, sprung to mind and Maglor added, “And, much to my dismay, never shall, as long as Doriath’s policy of isolationism continues.”

“Pish posh. What need have you to see her when before you stands the greatest bard in all Beleriand?”

Maglor thought to make some clever reference to his own reflection in the Pools’ dark waters but before he could, Daeron had produced a piccolo of his own and begun to play.

The tune was light and flitting, conjuring images of tree-shadowed hair and flashing feet, with a rhythm that skipped away, unattainable, whenever the listener thought they had the measure of it.

“A pretty piece,” said Maglor. “And no doubt she is a pretty girl. But if it is true beauty you want then I will show you.”

The song that he played then spoke of Tirion with its fountains molten silver in Telperion’s light and of jewels blazing upon the beaches of Elendë. It was a song of bounty and fulfillment. It was a song, he was sure, that would have won him the contest had Dareon not taken it upon himself to fall to his knees at his opponent’s feet, seized upon Maglor’s instrument and drawn it forth from its covering. With a musician’s supple fingers, with mobile lips and educated tongue, he began to play.

Maglor had breath control no less trained than his opponent and so not for one second did his playing falter. Not as Daeron hummed, harmonizing beautifully with the piece and sending delicious vibrations rippling through his throat. Not as his fingering picked up, riffing extemporaneously upon Maglor’s music.

The song changed, becoming, between the two of them, one that spoke of the burgeoning splendor they would bring to Beleriand; proud towers thrusting from the earth, trees grown tall and strong in sunlit woods, the untrammeled gush of rivers flowing across fertile plains.

Loathe as he was to admit it, Maglor had never played better, never had an accompanist more talented or appreciative. Their homophony interwove and then rose to a soaring crescendo, higher than the peaks of Thangorodrim, more scorching than its flames, unstoppable as the rush of an oncoming flood.

In the aftermath, they sank to their knees and then down to lie upon the sward, neither caring for the damage to their hats or the furious twittering of Daeron’s nightingales, too overcome by the beauty that they had created. Daeron, with languid elegance, began to clean out his spit valve.

“It’s so nice,” Maglor said, “to meet a fellow music lover.”

“And pleasant indeed to meet one who, if not as fair or lissome-limbed as Lúthien, she of the evening eyes and twilit hair, has an appreciation for the arts. Perhaps you would care for an encore?”

* * *

“Here,” said Maedhros and handed Círdan two plugs of wax.

“What about you?” Círdan asked, snatching them up, too desperately grateful to refuse.

“I’m used to it.” Maedhros was rather sick of pitying looks but none felt more warranted than the one Círdan turned upon him now.


	9. Maedhros, Fingon and an apology long overdue

“Fingon?” Maedhros said, though it came out more like ‘Fngmf.’ He blinked sleep from his eyes and struggled to if not sit then at least find a slightly more dignified variation of supine. “How long have you been sitting there? You should have woken me.”

“No,” Fingon said brightly. “I shouldn’t have.” Now that Maedhros was conscious enough to be annoyed, Fingon stretched out his legs and put his feet up on the counterpane.

In actuality Maedhros didn’t mind the boots but knew what was expected and batted them away. “I sleep too much as it is. You’d think I’d be sick of idleness but apparently that’s not so.” Once his dreams had been a reprieve desperately sought. Now that the waking world held care and comfort and the company of those he loved, it seemed perverse to spend so much time walking in memories of pain and bitter failure.

“Only you would call it idleness. Move over.”

Maedhros shuffled out of the way as best he could and Fingon climbed onto the bed beside him, muddy boots and all. “Do you think to punish my brothers still? It is not they that do my laundry.”

“As long as it is someone from your father’s host I’ll be content,” Fingon said cheerfully, repositioning them so that Maedhros was propped against his chest, Fingon’s arms wrapped around him, carefully avoiding the worst of his injuries.

Maedhros let himself be moved but said nothing, though the warm strength of Fingon’s hold was very welcome. What was there to say besides an apology he had already offered, and that Fingon had claimed to accept?

Fingon did not seem to notice his disquiet. “Maglor said he tried to play you his latest composition and you dozed off midway through. He was the most offended I’ve ever seen him.”

“I’ll thank you for not reminding me - he does that often enough himself. If he wants me to grovel then he shall have to wait his turn, for of all the crimes that weigh upon me I count that among the least.”

Fingon cocked his head, fierce brows and piercing gaze bringing to mind the uncomfortable image of a bird of prey upon the hunt. “On the mountain, you said- You said something I have wondered at. I was not sure what you meant.”

It was easy to read the reason for the seeming change of subject. Not a conversation that he wanted, but he owed Fingon this and more. “I’m sure that I said many things and meant little by them - I was more than half mad. What was it?”

“You said you let them burn. At Losgar?”

That was not the worst of his failures but that was saying very little. Even the sizzle of his own flesh charring beneath a Balrog’s lash had not dulled the remembered horror of the smell of burning pitch and roasting meat. And what were his own losses beside the thousands he had condemned to the long march across the Ice? It seemed impossible that Fingon could even stand to meet his eyes after all that he had suffered on Maedhros’ account.

“There’s some grovelling that’s well warranted,” Maedhros said slowly. “Would that I had struck Father or held his head beneath the surf until he came to his senses - certainly I was angry enough - but I held back from that as from the rest. I knew by then that he would not be moved by reason and still I did not- But you do not need to hear my self justifications. I failed you and I’m sorry for it.” His apologies were as insufficient as his thanks.

Fingon stared at him, eyes dark with some emotion Maedhros could not place. “But you stood aside?”

“Of course I-” Realisation struck, sudden and more painful than the lash. “You did not know.”

“How could I have?” Fingon’s voice was sharp but Maedhros had placed the look in his eyes now and it was not anger. Relief perhaps. Joy at a hope rewarded.

“And yet you came.”

“I did.” Fingon reached out and Maedhros took his hand, struggling to place what he was feeling himself. Fingon should not be pleased by what was only a failure to betray him as badly as Maedhros might have, and yet he was. And Maedhros should not be warmed to know his friend was fool enough to risk his life for such a creature.

“ _Idiot_ ,” he snapped. “Tell me it was to reunite our people.”

Fingon laughed. “That’s so.”

“Tell me you’re reckless and arrogant and thought to make Melkor look a fool.”

“Also true. And for one more reason.” Fingon paused and pulled Maedhros a little closer. “I’m a hero and it was the noble thing to do,” he said, his princely dignity belied by the tightness of his grip. “Why did you stand aside?”

“It was the noble thing to do,” Maedhros said. In place of a better answer he raised their joined hands and pressed his lips to Fingon’s knuckles.

Fingon coughed and blushed. “Well. This is good news indeed. The feud’s not mended yet but this ought to make it easier. If Father’s people must follow a Fëanorian, you’ll be easiest to swallow.”

“You would kn-”

“I repent of all my valiant deeds.”

“What? I meant only that you find me charming.” Maedhros yawned. “Anyway. As to the feud, I have a proposition to make to your father.”

“Oh?”

“Later. I’m overcome by another fit of indolence.”

Fingon made an abortive attempt to rise and Maedhros cleaved all the tighter to his hand. Though he was a good deal firmer than Maedhros’ pillows, he was warmer and Maedhros had slept in far less comfortable circumstances.

The memories still waited - they surely always would - but this might blunt their teeth a little.  

“Maedhros.”

“Mm.”

“I can’t feel my arm.”

“Neither can I.”

Fingon sighed and settled in. If he repented of his valiant deeds again, he did it very quietly so as not to wake him.


	10. Fëanor and the works of his hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written at the request of my flatmate for reasons I'm unclear on. It's all her fault.

All creation came at a cost. Who knew that better than the son of Míriel Þerindë?

Fëanor had known it would be high and so it was. He had known that it would hurt and so it had. What he had not anticipated was the aching sense of loss that followed after. He held the jewels - but ‘jewels’ was not word enough for such as they. He held the _silmarils_ and saw that they were light and life and hope. He saw they were the greatest of his works, the greatest work of any Child of Ilúvatar that had ever been or would ever be.

It should have been enough.

It should not have left him feeling hollowed out like a pitted cherry.

He could not work; no sooner were they begun then the inspiration for his new projects waned and died. His workshop and his forge filled up with abandoned blueprints and half finished things. His father asked if he had new theories to discuss and Fëanor lied and faked so many smiles he felt a sudden kinship with his stepmother.

He could not eat; food offered no relief from the yawning emptiness that had opened within him. His sons muttered amongst themselves when he pushed favourite dishes away untasted but not a one dared speak their concerns to his face.

He could not sleep; he lay curled upon his side, arms wrapped tight about his chest to hold himself together, staring into the silver dark of Telperion’s waxing. After a week of such restlessness Nerdanel, who was accounted wise and who knew much of creation and even more of him, tickled his sides, accused him of melodrama, and drew him into her arms. He loved her with words and lips and a craftsman’s clever fingers but in her touch he found no relief.

“Melodrama,” she muttered and rolled him over, pressed him down into the mattress and pressed spit slick fingers into him. Her hands were rough and calloused from long hours carving stone but worked his body with as much skill as she worked clay. It was not enough, not what he had lost, but she held him down and held him together, filled him enough that he gasped and shuddered and fell apart, seeing white light behind his closed eyelids.

She brushed back his hair and kissed his neck and murmured, “go to sleep.”

He did not sleep. He waited for her breathing to slow and then slipped from the bed and out into the corridor on silent feet. The Tree’s light laid silver filigree upon every blade of grass as he made his way across the lawn to his forge. He might have stopped to enjoy the sight had not a greater beauty awaited him within.

The door opened without so much as a creak - he had made the lock and hinges himself - and he barred it shut behind him.

There was no key for the coffer they were kept in for a key might be stolen from him. No, the silmarils were kept from the sight of the unworthy by the subtlest of puzzle locks to which no one but he knew the secrets. With all the tenderness of a lover, he twisted certain jewels, pressed in secret panels, traced unobtrusive lines of engravery until, soundless, the box opened to him.

Light burst from the box, pure and bright as the Trees at their mingling, and he could not suppress his gasp of wonder and pleasure as it washed over him.

They were smooth - what need to facet a gem filled with living light? - and cool beneath his hands, their radiance flaring all the brighter as he curled his fingers around them. They knew him, he thought, and responded to his touch. The light they gave off was strong enough he could see the delicate bones of his hand, dark shadows seen through the skin.

He clutched them to his chest, dropped his head to press his lips to their surface. Already they were warming to his touch.

But holding them like this was not enough. They were a part of him, kept separate far too long and he knew, with all the hazy clarity of a dream, how this might be mended.

There was oil in the forge, kept for the tempering of steel. Scarcely thinking about what he was doing, Fëanor coated his fingers and pressed into himself with two, then three, grateful for the work Nerdanel had already done to prepare him.

The jewels shone strangely beneath their sheen of oil, their brilliance refracted and split into a hundred thousand rainbows.

Upon his knees, he took the first of them and pressed it against the tight muscle of his entrance. For all his soul cried out in need his body resisted, yielding only reluctantly, until with a sudden, slick rush it was done.

Fëanor gasped, thighs trembling, hair falling in sweaty tendrils about his face. If he was entirely honest - and Fëanor was a man too proud to lie - those gasps were closer to sobs and he felt tears upon his cheeks. The jewel sat heavy inside him, a fullness, a wholeness that he had too long been without.

The second silmaril was easier than the first. His body knew his will now, understood its own need, and accepted the intrusion gladly. The two of them shifted within him, rubbing against each other and, suddenly, that place within him that dropped him to all fours and dragged a wail from his lips.

It was so much, and yet still not enough.

The stone of his workshop floor was cool against his heated flesh as he lay back upon it. His ardour had risen and, while one hand slid down to press the last silmaril home, the other closed about his member.

He thrust helplessly into his hand, the silmarils caressing him from within, their cool fire setting his blood alight with need, with joy and grief, with all those feelings that had been kept from him so long.

Light kindled within him, a bliss so pure and intense that, when he looked down at himself he was shocked to see his body did not glow with it. With his release so close, his muscles twitched and spasmed, clutching the jewels within him tighter, drawing greater pleasure from him until suddenly his release was upon him in a burst of the purest radiance he had ever beheld.

Had he ever understood light until then? Had he understood himself? Fëanor keened at the force of this sudden, overwhelming clarity but his workshop was proof against all sound. Not a one of his spying, gossiping household would find him here, nightshirt caught up beneath his arms, thighs slick with sweat and oil and seed.

There were notes to be taken before dawn robbed him of this new vision, calculations to be made, crystal seeds to prepare, and Fëanor leapt to his work.

As he stood, the jewels inside him shifted and he realised that there was an aspect of this that, in his haste, he had neglected to consider.

Still, he was a genius. He had created them, after all.

It couldn’t be _that_ difficult to get them back out.


	11. Feanor, his sons and the hallowing of Varda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spekarrot: 'okay so making up the whole hallowed by Varda' thing from sheer embarrassment is great, but consider this: feanor's unorthodox 'use' of the silmarils is what gives them their evil repellant properties. OR: Feanor getting the silmarils back and discovering he's not worthy of them anymore the hard way.   
> Anon: What if feanor's actions were considered of "of evil will" and he got scorched by varda's blessing

“And so our oath is fulfilled,” Fëanor said, voice soft and reverent. 

In the silmarils’ pure light the faces of his sons were changed; there was a hardness to their features that had never been there before, new scars, new lines of anger and of grief. 

It did not matter. His silmarils were his again. He could be whole. Closing the lid of the coffer that held them, he clutched it tightly to his chest. 

“See to our soldiers,” Fëanor said grandly, and retreated to his tent, near running with the urgency of his purpose. 

In his absence, his sons looked to their eldest brother, who looked resolutely at the sky. 

“So,” said Maglor. “Do we- should we- Um.” He stuttered to a halt, the greatest bard of the Noldor robbed of his eloquence for the first time in all their memories. 

“There is no need to do anything,” said loyal Curufin. “Our father knows what he is about.”

“Just like he knew what he was about when he set fire to our brother?” said Amras venomously. 

“Give me the palantir,” said Maedhros, still not looking at any of them. “I’ll call to Estë for aid.”

“Call to Estë?” Curufin hissed. Or, rather, lisped. “ _Craven_. We flew the Valar’s cage, overthrew Morgoth and reclaimed our inheritance without their aid, and you would go grovelling to them now?”

“I can call Estë, or you can deal with this yourself.” Maedhros nodded to Curufin’s bandaged hands. “I suppose you’re eager to see how your new burn treatments work when applied intern-  _oof_.” The palantir flew with so much force he doubled over.

“Our soldiers know what they’re about,” said Celegorm, the first of them to speak with any surety. “Who wants to leave them to it and get really, really drunk?”

Though he was not counted among the cleverest of his brothers, in this they yielded to his wisdom and were all safely insensible when the screaming started. 


	12. Maglor, Maedhros and the contentious matter of a crown

“You look dreadful, little brother,” Maedhros said wryly.

Despite his weariness and the awful blackness of the humour, Maglor smiled. He’d missed Maedhros horribly over the long years of his absence but it had become an abstract sort of sorrow. It was well to be reminded it was a person that he loved, sardonic and self-possessed, beneath the layers of bandages and nostalgia. “I don’t think the crown suited me,” he said, sitting down upon the camp stool beside the bed. “You have no idea what a relief it is to be rid of it.”

“I might,” Maedhros said, glancing to where it sat upon its stand. “It’s not as though it suits me any better. I’m sorry to have dropped it upon you, though by all accounts you bore up admirably under the weight. For what little it’s worth, I’m proud of you.”

“It’s worth more than you know,“ Maglor said because it was true and, more importantly, the right thing to say. "Do you think Father…?” That was not.

"Yes,” said Maedhros easily. “Of course.”

His brother had lied better before Morgoth stripped him bare. “You don’t have to pretend for me.”

“I’m your king. And your older brother. _Of course_ I do.” He sounded like he meant it.

As someone whose own chosen profession required a careful handling of the truth, Maglor was almost offended. “Do you know why I wrote the Noldolantë?

"To provide a simplified narrative so that our people might contextualise an incomprehensible tragedy?” Maedhros grinned. The missing teeth made it seem almost boyish. “We did share a music tutor.”

“You always said you weren’t paying attention - was that an excuse to mask your tone deafness?”

“It was. There’s some honesty for you,” his brother said and then, no longer smiling, “Here’s some more; I don’t know what Father would have thought. We didn’t speak after the burning save when he gave orders, and save when he had us swear again. And now he’s dead and I’ve still not forgiven him.”

“Have you forgiven us?” said Maglor softly.

“For what?” Maedhros said, too sharply to disguise that he knew all too well. “I know who he woke to do it, and I might as well blame a duckling for following its dam as Curufin for doing as Father bid him.”

“Have you forgiven us for leaving you?” Maglor said. He might have spoken sharply himself had his control over his voice not been absolute.

“Don’t,” Maedhros said, letting his head fall back against the pillows. Someone who hadn’t known him better would have thought he sounded tired.

“No, listen-”

“ _Don’t_.”

“You’ve not, then.” Maglor felt guilt and grief and a queasy kind of triumph and he allowed just a little of it to taint his tone.

“There’s nothing to forgive.“ Maedhros shifted and, with some difficulty, rolled over onto his left side, so that Maglor could no longer see his face. "In your place I would have done the same,” he told the canvas wall.

“But it is different, I imagine, to think that and to feel it. It is different to suffer - to be hurt again and again and _again_ \- and to know that all that time it was within your brothers’ power to-”

“Do you want me to slap you?” Maedhros interrupted. His right arm twitched and Maglor flinched.

“Yes.”

“Morgoth was not half so insufferable as you.”

“Of course not. He was not your little brother.”

Maedhros huffed what might have been a laugh, and then the silence stretched between them, overlong. Finally, when Maglor feared his brother had fallen asleep, Maedhros turned back to look at him and said, "I left you too.”

“You did.” Shamefully - Master Cellinthel would have his hide - Maglor’s voice cracked.

“Well.” That too-young smile again. Maedhros held out his hand. “I will if you will.” The same words that had them sneaking out of the house to a forbidden party at their uncle’s manse, getting their ears pierced by a half-drunk Teleri sailor, and diving from the cliffs of Elendë.

“That's  _it_? I was prepared for you to curse me for a traitor and I to call you a fool who got no less than he deserved. I had written a speech especially.” Maglor took the offered hand though, clinging to it with both of his.

Maedhros’ skin was rough, his grip weak but still comforting. “Haven’t you had your fill of melodrama?” he said. “Oh, read me the speech - I promise to cry in the appropriate places.”

“You won’t. Kings don’t cry.”

“Then it’s a good thing I came back when I did,” Maedhros said and freed his hand to pass Maglor a scrap of clean bandage from off the nightstand so that he might blow his nose.


	13. Fingon, Maedhros and a work in progress

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon: "Could you write a story how awkwardly teenage Fingon and Maedhros were crushing on each other back in Tirion? Their lame & cringey attempts at flirting? First teenage kiss?"

It had been easy once, Fingon remembered. He and Maedhros had spent hours together, laughing and talking of everything and nothing at all. But now their easy camaraderie was given over to strained silences, to awkward throat clearings and shuffling feet.

Strife would come between them in the end, pain and betrayal and a thousand miles of ice and war-torn kingdoms. But what lay between them _now_ was something far more insidious and far less surmountable:

Hormones.

Lying in the shade of the palace gardens together had been a pleasure once, he was sure; Laurelin shining warm upon his skin and the grass cool beneath him, while Maedhros read to him about metallurgy or meteorology or whatever had captured his father’s attention that week, or braided his hair into the most ridiculous styles he could conceive of, or pinned him to the turf in mock battles. Now the thought of those long ago wrestling matches - bodies pressed together, skin and sweat and hot breath in his ear - made his skin prick uncomfortably. And other things. 

“So,” he said to Maedhros, who was picking at his nails and avoiding Fingon’s eyes, as he had for the last half hour. He had beautiful hands and Fingon was momentarily distracted by the graceful movement of his fingers. “We should do something.”

“Yes!” said Maedhros. “I mean- yes.” There was an awkward silence in which he looked expectant and so handsome that Fingon forgot what he’d intended to suggest. “Swimming?” he tried, when they’d both been still too long. And then, judging from his blush, realised as quickly as Fingon had why that was impossible.

“R-” but Fingon chocked himself off before he could say ‘riding.’ “Read to me,” he said instead, leaning over to glance through the stack of books Maedhros had brought. The treatises he passed over, to light upon a slim, leather-bound volume. “What do you have here? ‘Ill Chance and Strange Fates’?”

“Elemmírë’s latest book of verse,” said Maedhros defensively. “I’m not reading you _that_.” He threw up his hands and flopping back to lie upon the sward, seemingly coincidentally knocking the book out of Fingon’s reach. “This is ridiculous.”

“What is? Are you implying you have things you’d rather do than sit in awkward silence with me?” It was only half a joke. 

“Many.” At Fingon’s expression he sat up in a hurry, scraps of grass still clinging to his hair. “Many things I’d rather do _with you_.” Maedhros covered his eyes. “Why is this so difficult?”

“Why is _what_ so difficult,” Fingon almost said. He didn’t though, because it wasn’t like that would be enough to make Maedhros put words to the awkward _something_ that lay between them. Instead, with infinite care, Fingon leaned forwards and plucked one of the scraps of dead grass from off his shoulder. “We have to do something,” he said twisting the dry stalk between his fingers, and did not mean with their afternoon. He’d not sat back and his breath stirred Maedhros’ hair, brushing it back from his face enough to expose, for a moment, the angle of his jaw, the elegant line of his neck.

“Well, ‘Fingon the Valiant,’-”

“I was eighteen!” said Fingon, who was long sick of hearing the story and _certainly_ not secretly proud. “I didn’t know the pig was going to do that.”

“Ssh. One of us is going to have to be brave and it certainly won’t be me.” But Maedhros was an inveterate liar and already leaning closer.

It did not take much courage for Fingon to close the distance himself.

They bumped noses, brushed lips. Maedhros didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Fingon tangled his own in Maedhros’ hair, pulled too hard and won a nip to his lower lip far too hard to be erotic. It was far too wet and if Fingon had planned this he would have checked his breath before they started.

It was _amazing_ and they only pulled apart when both of them were panting, dizzy from lack of air and from finally putting words to what that _something_ was. Or, not words, precisely, but mouths were involved and Fingon considered it close enough.

Afterwards he sat back on his heels - but not too far back - and licked his lips. “Was it supposed to be…”

“Awful?“ But despite it all, Maedhros’ eyes were shining and he was smiling as wide as Fingon had ever seen. “I doubt it. ‘If the first of your works was perfect, why would you ever bother to make a second?’”

“Don’t quote your father when I’m trying to kiss you.”

“There’s a very easy way to stop me,” Maedhros said, and Fingon did.


	14. Sauron, Celebrimbor and the Gwaith-i-Mírdain's invention of deodorant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon: '"naked Maiar are smelly" - I feel like there could be a story on that *hint* *hint*'

It was all going _wonderfully_. Annatar’s research proceeded apace, his political power waxed and the Gwaith-i-Mírdain were completely cozened, none more so than their master who lay before him now, bare skin gleaming like burnished bronze in the candlelight. 

Oh, how haughty Fëanor would rage to see his grandson so debased, spread naked and willing for the attentions of his mighty foe. Annatar allowed himself the smallest smirk and then set to stripping off the outer layers of his Fána, those that comprised his ‘robes,’ so that he might seal his victory.

“Ugh,” said Celebrimbor, wrinkling his nose. “Can you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“It’s like- Ai, Elbereth, words fail me. Like the time Olben knocked over the cabinet containing the Butyric acid and Putrescine. Like a midden full of rotting trout.” 

“Maybe- maybe there’s a problem with the drains.”

“I designed them myself.” Celebrimbor coughed and it turned into something dangerously close to a retch. “Annatar- I apologise for my indelicacy but-”

Annatar cursed himself for a fool. He should have been more careful, should have concealed the mark of his ‘corruption’ better but now it was too late. His beautiful scheme lay in ruins, shattered like a fine clockwork toy beneath the heel of a clumsy child. He had no choice. Much as it grieved him, he would have to kill the jewelsmith. He raised his hands, ready to close them about that elegant throat-

“-Did you just fart?”

As Melkor’s servant Annatar had borne indignities uncountable, and so it was now that he found the strength within to bow his head and whisper “… _Yes_.”

“Oh. _Oh Valar._ ” Celebrimbor staggered to where he’d dropped his clothes, throwing his overrobe on over his nakedness and leaving the rest in their heap. “Please don’t take this as a rejection- _please,_ I- agh, I just need some air.” He staggered, still gagging, to the door and threw himself through it.

In the darkness of his chambers, Annatar let himself smirk again. Left alone with Celebrimbor’s private papers and him not suspecting a thing. 

It was all going _wonderfully_. 


	15. Beor, Finrod and the xeno kink that should have been better negotiated

When his men asked him what drew him to the Nómin he spoke of jewels strung in golden hair, like dew upon a strand of cobweb gilded by the dawn. He spoke of skin soft and supple as the fairest maiden, of voices sweet as birdsong, pure as the waters of silver streams. Wise hearts and clever hands and easy generosity. **  
**

None of that came even close to the true reason.

“Bëor,” Finrod gasped. His ears were flat against his head in what, in other circumstances, would have indicated distress. Bëor, lying atop him, dipped his head and took the tip of one between his teeth. The elf shuddered and, when Bëor bit down harder and put his tongue to use, keened aloud.

Bëor had learnt that, if he dedicated enough time to it, he could bring him off with only that much stimulation. He might even have done it then but Finrod was not feeling cooperative and there was nothing Bëor could do in the face of that. The elf was strong - exactly how strong Bëor was not sure, but certainly enough so that he could handle Bëor, tallest and mightiest of his people, as though he were a child. Finrod rolled them both over now and sat atop him, ears pricked, grinning triumphantly. His eyes threw back the firelight like those of a hunting cat, bright and cold as the distant stars, and Bëor thought it no bad fate to be the prey of a monster so fierce and beautiful.

“I want to have you,” the elf said, in the same warm voice with which he had first awoken wisdom in their hearts, and the visions that he sent before Bëor’s eyes were such that he almost spent right there and then.

Bëor could only nod and spread his legs, thighs trembling, as the elf crouched between them like a cat over its kill.

Finrod worked him open with fingers slender as a maid’s but strong as the new steel he had taught them to forge, and with careful, maddening thrusts of his tongue.

(“We do not do that,” Bëor had said the first time. “There are sicknesses that-”

“‘Sicknesses’?” Finrod had laughed. “Small wonder the Secondborn think themselves cheated.”)

Bëor moaned and rocked back against him needing more, needing it now, but Finrod was inclined to take his time in all things, especially this. He would not be hurried and so Bëor was almost frantic with need when he at last drew back and set about slicking his cock.

He pressed in with one long, slow thrust and suddenly Bëor could feel him inside his body and inside his mind, an echo of the elf’s own pleasure warming him, blotting out the discomfort of that first burning stretch.

No lover from his own people could be so attentive, so completely understanding of what he needed. No other lover would know to change the angle so, to go just that fast, to take his cock and press just there, and then feel Bëor’s pleasure as his own.

No lover of the race of Men could hold him down so, gentle but with all the strength of the mountains and the oceans behind him. They would not smell like new grass and the electric air before a storm. No human lover would whisper in his ear, lovely, filthy words in a language that Bëor did not know but whose meaning blossomed in his mind like lilacs blooming.

Bëor felt Finrod’s climax building as surely as he felt his own, and when the elf gave a great cry and spent into him, it was the bright reflection of that pleasure that brought him his own release.

The elf looked no less put together afterwards than he had before, his hair still neat and shining, his body unmarred with sweat or the lovebites Bëor had pressed there. He kissed the sweat from Bëor’s brow and ran a hand over the tangle of his beard and then the thicket of hair above his member, a fascination he had never overcome.

“You were perfect,” Finrod whispered gently. “Also we’re married now.”


	16. Amlach and the leftovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [a meta](http://tyelpings.tumblr.com/post/155330777680/so-there-was-a-post-going-around-about-how-elves) on elven funerary customs...

Amlach had learnt their tongue quite well over the past three months. Not _their_ tongue as they were quick to point out, but the one that all at Himring spoke. He could discuss supplies and troop movements, parse orders upon the battlefield, and understood most of the jokes in their filthy marching songs - Eldar or no, soldiers were soldiers wherever you went.

That was not, perhaps, enough for whatever they were asking of him now.

“Triwiel is dead,” he repeated, certain of that much, if only because he’d seen her take that arrow to the throat with his own eyes.

The soldier nodded her head emphatically and said something in their rapid, lilting language that he knew he’d misunderstood.

“How can she eat with us if she’s dead?”

“Not with us,” said Tuluspen, the steward, who had apparently been eavesdropping and knew Amlach’s own tongue well enough to translate. “Tonight we feast in remembrance of her. You are welcome to attend - Triwiel was strong and very wise, and we think that it would please her to live on in you, as she will live on in all of us. Will you partake?” Her tone made it clear that she did not offer this lightly.

“I would be honoured,” Amlach said carefully. From her solemnity, he had expected she would ask something greater than attendance at a funerary feast, but the Eldar were strange like that, sometimes sad for no reason he could see, sometimes as gleeful as children.

“You must fast until tonight,” said the steward. “And now I must see to the preparations.”

* * *

The hall was crowded fit to bursting - Triwiel had been kind, one of the elves that had made him feel most welcome, tried hardest to learn his tongue, and so it was not so surprising that so many others loved her and wished to see her on her way.

Although it was not the custom of his own people, some tribes of the Edain would wash and dress the corpse in finery, and sit it at the head of the table. The woman in the seat of honour was not Triwiel though; she was very much alive. A sister, perhaps, a daughter, a mother or a wife. He had not yet learnt how to tell.

“Amlach,” said Lord Maedhros, waving him over to sit beside him, out of the worst of the bustle. “Did Tuluspen invite you?”

“She did.” Now that he was close enough, he could see that the Elf was frowning. “Was that ill done?”

Maedhros gestured dismissal of the concern with his one hand. “You’re very welcome here. But we know your customs are not ours. If you do not wish to eat, we’ll understand.”

Amlach glanced around the hall. The elves were clustered in small groups, talking quietly, faces not joyful but not sorrowing either. If he listened he could hear Triwiel’s name echoing through every conversation. “I’m honoured,” he repeated. “I wish that I’d known her better.”

“Well so you shall,” said Maedhros, and then changed the subject before Amlach could ask him what he meant. “My cousin has made a study of your culture, as I have not. He tells me that you burn your dead.”

“We do.” They’d left ashes behind them on the long journey to Estolad and safety, more pyres than he could ever count, burning bright and driving back the night until their fuel was spent. “A fitting way for a Man to end, no?”

The Elf shook his head. “My father burned. And my brother. It was a terrible thing. They are lost to us forever now.”

“Better that than for the bodies to lie untended, preyed upon by beasts of the wild.” They had left near as many corpses as pyres - there was not always the time or wood or safety to do as was proper. “My own father lives but if he should fall before me then mine shall be the torch that lights his pyre. I shall grieve but such is the way of things”

“If Finrod were here I expect he would say something about how it is the fate of Men to pass beyond the reaches of the world that we stay bound to. But I’ve never cared for philosophy over practical concerns. At Cuiviénen we knew better than to let anything go to waste and what we forgot in Valinor, Morgoth made sure we learnt again.”

“If you wish a practical explanation, we do it to prevent disease,” said Amlach. “But you have not said what it is that your people-”

The hall fell suddenly silent as the steward entered, bearing a great platter. She placed it before the mourning woman and, leaning closer, Amlash saw that upon it lay a heart, deep red as the rubies on his lord’s circlet. It glistened wetly in the torchlight as Tuluspen set it down at the head of the table. The woman sat there gave a great wail and then seized it in both hands and raised it to her lips.

Amlach’s gorge rose in his throat. Other platters were coming out now, heaped high and steaming, and one was set before him. He did not dare look down, although a savoury smell was rising from it and his empty belly growled its interest. He could not look away from the woman with the heart in her hands and the blood of someone she had loved about her mouth.

“You can still leave,” said the lord beside him. There was meat upon his plate also, thinly sliced strips of something that Amlach might have taken for pork had he not known better. As Amlach watched he speared a forkful and brought it to his mouth. All around him, the Eldar ate as though this were any other feast, filling each other’s glasses and passing platters down the table.

Perhaps not any feast; some joked and laughed and stood to sing - of Triwiel, he thought - while some were quiet, clung to each other or wept into their bowls. It was a funeral after all, however strange, however vile he found it.

Amlach made himself look down. Upon his own plate was a tongue.

He could not help the sudden bark of laughter and had to clasp his hands over his mouth to stifle it. What would they do if he vomited here and now?

“Triwiel had a terrible sense of humour,” said Maedhros. “I fear Tuluspen’s honouring her in that.”

“Do you truly believe that this will let me speak your language?” he asked. Looking to delay, he took a long drink of ale and then wondered, too late, if there was any of her in that as well.

“Insofar as people learn better with full stomachs.” Maedhros reached across and took the plate from before him, then handed it to someone further down the table. Amlach watched it go with something like guilt and no small amount of relief.

“When I die, will you…?”

“I imagine in fifty years time you’ll be too tough to bother with. Get yourself a son and have him light your pyre for you.”

“Aye, I think that I’ll do that. If you’ll excuse me, Lord.” At Maedhros’ nod, he went outside to seek cold air and a place to get his nausea under control.

* * *

He saw other funerals after, many of them, and did not take part in those either. No one seemed offended - more meat for them, he supposed.

The war was all; he found himself no wife and no children. Come winter and wet weather his joints ached and he found new wrinkles and grey hairs with every dawn.

They would burn him if he asked it, he knew. As his father had been burnt, and his mother, and his sister. But sometimes he thought of that woman with tears in her eyes and blood upon her lips, of a whole people gathered to become one with one they loved, and wondered if the flames were what he wanted after all. 


	17. Fingon, Maedhros and a rainy day in Dor-lómin

“-six, seven, eight, and I’m building a fortress in Himlad.” **  
**

“You can’t. You could only build a fortress if you owned all of the Marches, and I hold Estolad.”

“This game is stupid. When the weather clears I’m going to build a fortress there for real and there won’t be a damn thing you can do to stop me.”

* * *

“Right hand green.”

“Er.”

* * *

“Where’s the Doriathrim army?”

“They were the…yellow pieces, yes? I only see two. I think Huan might have eaten the rest.”

“Oh well! We can play without them.”

* * *

“ _Hmph_.”

“I don’t care how much you sulk, I’m not letting you spell ‘sewing’ like that. I don’t know where you even got a ‘Þ’ tile.”

* * *

“Túrin Turambar in Taur-nu-Fuin with Anglachel.”

“But was it Túrin that killed him or was it Morgoth’s curse acting through-”

“Just open the damn envelope.”


	18. Amras and the end he should have made

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous: 'what if Amras was one of the ones who turned aside at Sirion?'

He could not put his finger on what it was that broke him.

Not the screams or the flames or the blood in his hair and in his mouth, not the pain of his wounds, or the certain knowledge that this was as futile as anything else they’d ever done.

Not the moon-faced soldier he gutted like the fish her knife had been designed to clean - if he could not slaughter fisherfolk he’d have burnt at Losgar with his twin.

Not the unpaved roads and rude driftwood huts they fought in. Menegroth had been splendid in its ruin and they could pretend to be the same, but this deed was as pathetic as the defences Sirion mustered against them.

All he knew was that when his blade bit bone and slipped from his grasp, he let it fall and did not pick it up.

He might have died there when a soldier wearing Turgon’s stained and tattered livery thrust for his chest, but his brothers were beside him and Maedhros knocked the spear aside while Maglor’s second sword opened the man’s throat.

“Pick it up,” his liege lord said, in a voice like the scrape of iron and the clamour of warhorns, so heavy with command that Amras almost leapt to obey him.

Almost, but did not. “I can’t.”

“Amras. Pick up your sword,” said Maedhros again, more gently.  _Amras, eat your vegetables. Amras, wash your face. Amras, hold the line._

_Amras. Take no prisoners._

“No.”

Before he could say more, there came the thunder of hooves and Sirion’s cavalry came storming down the street towards them.

They had no pikes - Sirion was slick alleyways and cramped shacks, and they had no room for polearms or proper formations - and so all those that could leapt aside rather than meet the charge. Upon the breast of the lead rider burnt a light so pure and fair that for a second the whole dingy, bloody street seemed more a carnival than a charnel house. But Amras did not need to see the light to know what she carried. He felt the hook of the Oath catch at his heart and sank to his knees lest it drag him beneath her horses’ hooves. Distantly, he saw his elder brothers clutch each other against the pull of that same urge. Their faces, in the silmaril’s white light, were twisted by an awful hunger and Amras was dearly glad he could not see himself.

And then the jewel was past them, and it was far too late.

His eldest brother cursed. “After her!” he cried, scrambling up into the saddle of a horse so stained with smoke and lather Amras could not tell whether it wore their livery or Elwing’s. “Maglor, see to him,” he called down and kicked it hard into a canter. Those of their followers still mounted sprang away after him, at the fastest pace they could risk in a street so choked with debris.

“Of the three of us, you’re the fastest rider,” Maglor observed as the dust eddied and settled.

Amras said nothing. The air was rank with blood and the loosened bowels of the dead, with the cauldron of fish stew that had overturned onto the cookfire.

“You did not hesitate at Doriath.”

What was there to say?

“You swore. As we all swore.”

“Wrongly. Madly.” Amras picked up his sword again and held it loosely at his side. The handle was sticky-slick against the leather of his glove.

Maglor shrugged. “Yes.”

“This needs to end.”

“You will feel very foolish in an hour’s time when our brother returns, silmaril in hand.”  _There are no monsters beneath the bed, Amras. Spiders fear you more than you fear them._

_It is a mercy for they’re hardly even people anymore._

“We both know that he won’t. ‘Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue.’ This needs to end,” Amras said again.

Maglor was the bard but, in that dingy alleyway, it was not his voice that rang with certainty. “Then end it, little brother.  _Leave_. I, at least, won’t force you to go on.”

“ _You_ won’t.” Amras raised his sword to guard. “Amrod was the luckiest of us. What Father did to him was a mercy.”

“Are we not cursed enough?” Though he took a step backwards, Maglor’s voice held no fear - it never held anything he did not want it to. “Put up your sword. You can still walk away.”

Maglor had always been a liar and never had known when to let a story end.

In the ruins of a refugee camp, Amras made one for himself.


	19. Amrod, Amras and thoughts offered on adoption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anon: 'If Amrod and Amras had survived the Attack of Sirion what would they've said about Maglor's kidnapping of Elrond and Elros?'

“What’re they?” said Amrod. 

The nursery floor was littered with toys, broken furniture and the pieces of the boys’ nurse and Maglor had to pick his way carefully over to the door. “Elwing’s sons,” he said and clutched them closer to his chest. One of them whimpered in protest but now was not the time to offer comfort. 

“What’re you doing with them?” said Amras. Smoke and sweat had darkened their hair to the same shade and Maglor might have struggled to tell them apart had not a blow to the head torn open Amras scalp and taken off most of his right ear. The blood was very stark against the pallor of his face but he was smiling. 

“Were we not twins enough for you?” said Amrod. 

“Should we be hurt?”

“They’re hostages,” said Maedhros, who had watched silent from the doorway until then. “Against their parents’ return and Gil-Galad’s reprisal. Are you all ready to ride out? We’ve sighted Círdan’s sails.”

The twins looked to each other. “That’s not wise, brother.”

“Gil-Galad will come for them.”

“For their claim to his crown, for kindness or for spite.”

“Don’t give him the excuse.”

“We can’t leave them,” Maglor said, letting his voice grow soft and persuasive. “And it would be  _good_  to have children around us once again. For our people’s morale and ours. You two would not remember, being the youngest, but-”

“We can’t afford to take them.” Amrod snatched up a carved wooden top and balanced it upon the tip of one finger. 

“We’re so poor we’re taking handouts from poor Maedhros.”

It was true that Maedhros had ordered his golden prosthetic melted down some time ago but Maglor thought that owed more to their brother’s self-pitying histrionics than concern for their finances. “We can afford to feed two children,” Maglor said and shot Maedhros a pleading look. 

“Of course we can. If you’re so concerned about the emptiness of our coffers, why aren’t you working to fill them?” Maedhros gestured away, down the hall towards the lord and lady’s chambers. “You have ten minutes.”

“You two have been no fun at all since Doriath,” sniped one of the twins, Maglor did not see which, as both slunk from the room to look to looting. 

“I thought you sent them to secure the docks,” said Maglor when he was sure that they were gone. 

“I did,” said Maedhros flatly. 

Maglor stroked the boys’ hair and hummed the briefest snatch of Song, something to calm them and dull the razor edge of memory. “And yet they were in here before me. If the nurse had not distracted them-”

“They always did look up to Celegorm,” said Maedhros wearily and Maglor was, once again, very glad that  _he_  was not the head of their House and that this was not his problem to solve. “Get the boys down to the courtyard and onto a horse. And keep them close.”


	20. Amrod, Amras and a second set of twins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous: 'Yes yES! Bloodthirsty feanorian twins are wonderful. I can't imagine the chaos of having two sets of twins around. Two more people Elros has to figure out how to poison'

“Come hunting with us, little chicks!” It was Amras that spoke - telling twins apart was no hardship for Elrond or Elros. 

“We have so much to show you,” said his brother. They wore their hunting greens and bright, sharp smiles. “All the deep, secret places of the woods.”

“The cool, clear streams where fat trout swim and the deer go to drink.”

“Where hunters go to lie in wait.”

“Trees so vast that you can walk beneath them for hours and never see the sun.”

“Glades where the moss is deep as a feather bed, a sweet cushion for weary little bones.”

“Where the nightingales sing all day and night. They are so small, there is much sport to be had in hunting them.”

“We will show you how!”

“Come with us, come, come!” 

“Why do you tremble, Eluréd? What are you so afraid of?”

Not the woods. Not, now, Maglor with his sweet voice and conniving ways, who would have them forget the face of their mother if he could. Not ruthless Maedhros who, if he convinced himself he had to, would kill them without pause. There were monsters worse than they. 

“We have a music lesson,” Elrond lied. 

Elros took his hand and squeezed it hard. “Maglor would be so disappointed if we missed it.”

“He’s expecting us very soon.”

“We’re sorry,” they said as one. 

“Ah well,” said Amras. 

“There’ll be another time.” Amrod’s expression had not changed at all. He still smiled much too wide. Or, rather, displayed his teeth. 

“There always is.”


	21. Maedhros, a wing and a prayer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anonymous asked: worst AU of the year award: The host of fingolfin arrives in middle-earth first, fingon is captured by morgoth and maedhros rescues him. (or not?? if you want this AU to be even worse??)

“They call it the Battle of the Lammoth,” said Maglor. “Horribly literal and I would gladly give them a better name for it but they aren’t much willing to divulge the details.”

Maedhros rested his chin upon his steepled fingers. “Two dead princes will do that.”

His brother’s expressive face rearranged itself from a grimace of distaste to one of genuine distress. “One dead, one worse. They do not say it but a silence is very telling to a trained ear. Argon was killed but- are you sure you wish to hear it?”

“Tell me.”

Maglor did. “I’m sorry,” he added. “I know you loved him well.”

“Mm.” Maedhros unlaced his fingers and then laid them flat upon his desk, unsure what else to do with them. His palm lay upon his sketchy map of Beleriand, covering both Mithrim and the Iron Mountains; it was not so great a distance. 

“I hope you’re not planning to do anything rash,” Maglor said carefully, following his gaze. 

“As we have seen, rashness is a luxury a king cannot afford.” 

A pause, as both of them remembered. A living pyre and swearing for the second time with ash upon their tongues. 

“Your orders then, sire?” 

“We must give our uncle our condolences. And more than condolences if we are to have any hope of him listening. How large is his host? How well provisioned?”

Maglor had no head for logistics but his memory was well schooled. “Half again as many soldiers as us, but poorly outfitted, or so say our brother’s scouts.”

“Horses?”

“None.”

“Good. That is a place to start.”

* * *

It was not in Maedhros to be rash and even if it had been, he was king.

He sent messengers to their uncle - to Aredhel in truth, for Fingolfin and his heir were deep in grief. It was she that took her pick of their herds as a gift or weregild and welcomed their healers and masons when he sent them to mend what they might. He did not ask her and told himself it was because it would be impolitic. Or because she had always been closer to his brothers (as he had been closer to hers). Or because her grief was greater and it would be cruel to remind her of it. 

An uneasy peace was built - stones were thrown and unkind words but no one died and Maedhros considered that a victory. 

It was not enough. He had to be sure.

All of his brothers were clever and all more skilled than he, for all that they were no more inclined to cooperate - with each other or the world at large - than a bag of wet cats. He delegated, more than he ever had before, cajoling here and cursing there, ensuring each shored up the others’ weaknesses until he thought that maybe, if he was lucky, the whole edifice would not topple if he was removed. 

“A king must not be rash,” he told them then. “But the oath is rash and we are bound to it. There is only one thing to be done.”

They did not believe him - which was fair for he was lying after all - but he did it anyway and when Curufin sneered and said they scarcely needed his leadership anyway, Maedhros managed not to laugh. 

“This will not buy forgiveness,” his uncle said, turning the beaten gold circlet in his hands. The Ice had been hard on him, what had come after harder still, and there were lines of grief etched in his ageless face. 

“What else can we give you?” Maedhros asked, as though he did not know.

“You could give me back my sons, Fëanorion.”

“I am not Námo, Uncle. Say rather ‘son’.”

“Say what you mean.”

Maedhros didn’t because it was too foolish a thing to put words to. Instead, he checked his pack and saddled his horse and hugged his brothers goodbye - those of them that weren’t sulking anyway. 

And then he rode away towards the three peaks of Thangorodrim. 

It was a very rash thing to do, but he wasn’t a king now, was he?

* * *

There was Nienna for healing and Estë for peace, Tulkas for strength and Nessa for swiftness. 

Manwë for his mercy and Varda for light in dark places.

And Ulmo, Lord of salt waters, surely had some power over blood-

Likely he was hysterical. Surely not a one of them would answer if he called. 

If he had ever questioned his father, it had been for murdered sailors, stolen ships and friends and family abandoned to the Ice. But wrong or not, mad or not, the Valar were not their masters and had no right to sunder families as it pleased them. 

The Noldor did that well enough themselves. 

In his arms, Fingon was still and very cold. 

His skin was dry and marked by scars that Maedhros did not know. Frostbite, maybe, and ice-bears and orcish swords before they took him, wounds won honestly to match those scratches he’d so boasted of in Valinor. Maedhros hoped but could not make himself believe.

“Don’t leave,” Fingon had said when he still had strength to beg and Maedhros had promised that he wouldn’t. Another oath but this one he made easily. If only because, though he had slipped into Angband, he held little hope of slipping out, with Fingon or without him.

“Not by my will,” he said and Fingon sighed and closed his eyes and bled a little more. 

The bandages were well tied. He had wrapped Fingon in his cloak, given him water, done all that could be done for him. 

It would be enough or it would not be. 

The Valar would not answer him. 

Nevertheless, he raised his face to the heavens and prayed. 

* * *

The eagle clacked its great hooked beak. “‘On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East’,” it recited. 

“Then leave me,” Maedhros said. “But Fingon is blameless-” Pinned by the gaze of those great golden eyes, he choked upon the lie. “Everything he did, he did for love.”

“‘And upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also.’ What did your father do for love? What have you done?”

 _Nothing I am ashamed of_ , he tried to say but again the lie would not come. “Did you come here just to taunt me? Help him. Please.”

“The Valar are not without pity,” said the eagle. Maedhros was tall but Thorondor had to duck his head so that they stood nose to beak. “You would do very well to remember that.” He hunched himself forwards and for a moment Maedhros thought he was going to take his head off, but then he saw the eagle meant for them to mount. 

“The finest of our herds-”

“I am the Lord of Eagles. Do not seek to buy my favour, son of Fëanor,” Thorondor said with a crisp snap of his beak. He stood very still as Maedhros went about the undignified business of scrambling up his slick feathered side with Fingon’s limp body in his arms and then, when he judged they were settled (even if Maedhros did not), waddled to the edge of the ledge. “Five heads of cattle, and no less,” he called and leapt into the void. 

* * *

“You always were my favourite nephew,” Fingolfin said, once they knew Fingon would live. 

It was patently untrue and had Galadriel hissing like a kettle come to boil and Curufin pursing his lips against a smile. Maedhros, fresh from rinsing clots of his cousin’s blood out of his hair, thanked him gravely and moved the subject on, to the matter of kingdoms and supplies. 

“ _Fool_ ,” Curufin snapped afterwards. “We can use this. The crown-”

“Is something we are well rid of.”  _Our priority is the Oath_ , he would have added, not long ago. “Fingon will not take well to being maimed,” he said instead. “If you’re so concerned with winning hearts, see what you can do for him.”

* * *

“It was not so bad as all that,” Fingon insisted when he was well enough to insist upon anything. “Merely dull.”

“Boredom was the worst torture they could imagine for you, no doubt,” Maedhros said and held him through the nightmares without comment. It was, perhaps, the worst torture he could imagine for himself but that was a maudlin, self-indulgent thing to think.

* * *

“The ballad that I shall make of this!” Maglor cried. All his resentment over being left to rule as regent had vanished in the face of such a song. “A light of hope, blazing against the dark! A triumph of love and loyalty over wicked cruelty!”

Maedhros remembered well the eagle’s words and remembered too that Morgoth’s followers were loyal. He let Maglor have his song though, for they were in desperate need of hope and because it would likely annoy Fingon a great deal. 

* * *

“I cannot believe you let them make a song of it,” said Fingon, greatly annoyed. “Fingon the Valiant they called me and yet in this great accounting of Noldorin deeds I am a useless, swooning lump. First my hand and now my epithet. What will you steal from me next?”

“Keep the Valiant,” Maedhros said soberly. “But add that stuffed horse I never returned to the tally of my crimes.” 

“Do not think I have forgotten. Cloppy will be avenged once I can wield a sword again.” That Fingon could and would learn to fight with his left had not been in doubt since the moment he first woke.

There were apologies to be made. For the ice and the docks and for not being handier with a file. But when Maedhros opened his mouth and saw the look on Fingon’s fair, scarred face, he knew they would not be welcome. He kissed Fingon instead, and that was accepted with unprincely enthusiasm.

Love was not sufficient reason for so many things. But for some it was. 


	22. Fingon and a kindled flame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anonymous asked: maedhros sparked fingon's sexual awakening can you write it

There were a hundred thousand moments that it might have been; Maedhros, nimble-fingered, picking twigs from Fingon’s hair and trying not to laugh after a disastrous attempt at amateur ornithology; sharing a horse after one came up lame upon a hunt, his cousin’s warm body pressed against his and an arm looped casually about his waist; swimming together naked in the chill waters of Elendë, the reflected ocean turning grey eyes almost blue.   **  
**

It wasn’t any of them.

Would that it had been.

No, when Fingon first looked at his cousin and felt desire kindle in his heart and heat coil in his loins, though they did stand beside the water still, it was not the sea that was reflected in Maedhros’ eyes.

They were black from side to side, all pupil, and in the light of Fingon’s torch they burned.

“You came,” Maedhros said. He was panting, chest heaving, lips drawn back to show his teeth in what might have been a smile or a snarl or neither.

“I did.” Fingon bit his own lip against the sudden desire to kiss that fierce look from off his face. “What happened? Why did they turn on us?”

There was blood on Maedhros’ face, a long smear of it following the contour of one high cheekbone, more splattered across his surcoat, and the sword in his hands was dark with it from point to hilt.

Fingon’s pulse quickened at the sight of it and he stepped over the corpse that lay between them to touch the smudge upon Maedhros’ cheek.

“It’s not mine,” Maedhros said, turning his head to lean into the caress. “None of it is.” His voice was rough, from calling orders, Fingon thought.

“I know.”

“Fingon, you shouldn’t-”

What Maedhros thought he should not do, Fingon never did find out. The patter of booted and bare feet ran hollow upon the jetty as five sailors rounded the nearest hull and came racing towards them.

Maedhros leapt to meet them with all the grace of a stooping hawk, sidestepping a thrust and slipping his own blade up beneath the lead fisherman’s guard to open up her throat.

And Fingon raised his own sword and was lost. 


	23. Maedhros, his brothers, and the buddy system

The Fëanorian command tent was a scarlet wound against the black winter trees of Doriath. Within, the six remaining sons of Fëanor shivered together, chilled by the bitter wind and the terrible knowledge of the crime they were about to commit. **  
**

Maedhros looked up from the maps and markers spread upon the table to meet the eyes of each of his brothers in turn. A pale flame burnt within him and his voice, when he spoke, was steel and stone.

“Does everyone have their weapons?”

“Yes,” the others chorused obediently, raising them for inspection.

“Does everyone have a buddy?”

“The buddy system is foolish,” said Caranthir, face dark with defiance.

“But what happens when we don’t use it?”

“People get lost. Or kidnapped by Morgoth,” said Curufin with a smile like a twisting knife.

“Or set on fire,” said Amras pointedly and his brothers subsided into sulky silence.

“Right,” Maedhros went on, when it was clear there would be no further arguments. “I’ve packed lunch for you all- yes Maglor, I remembered to cut the crusts off your lembas. Caranthir, eat your  _own_ food, no trading.”

“Can we  _go_?” Celegorm shifted from foot to foot, eager as a hound with the scent of prey in its nostrils.

“Put your helmet on first and don’t go taking it off the moment you’re out of sight.”

“It messes up my hair.”

“Do you think a sword to the head won’t mess it up worse? Thank you. Now did everyone remember to use the latrines?”

“ _Maedhros_!”

With a will that had defied the Enemy’s torment and held cold Himring against him for five centuries, the once High King stared his brothers down. “I’m not stopping this kinslaying because someone didn’t go when they had the chance.”


	24. Celegorm, Curufin, and a dearth of brotherly understanding

“-courted her fairly, at which point she spurned my hospitality and stole my dog!” **  
**

“That’s rough, brother.”

“I haven’t even told you the worst part yet.”

“It gets worse? Surely not.” Maedhros refilled his brother’s goblet. Curufin glared at him but did not interrupt - could not interrupt if the bruises circling his throat were any indication. “Tell on,” Maedhros said and Celegorm did.

“We need to sack Doriath,” he finished. “And Nargothrond.”

“Both of them? I’m a little short handed right now.” Maedhros gestured expressively.

Curufin glared harder. Celegorm was too drunk on wine and bitterness to notice. “Doriath then. Just Doriath.”

“Can we not- what was it you did last time you felt jilted? Nail a hart’s heart to her door? Write her a poem expressing your disdain? ‘O maiden shrike whose thorns have pierced my chest-’”

Celegorm coloured. “I was thirty nine.”

“Time does not seem to have improved your judgement.”

“My judgement? I judge  _you_ to be craven and complacent. We shall have no victory and no end to our oath while all the free realms lie divided, and yet you cringe in your fortress like a beaten cur, afraid to act without your master’s orders.”

Sometimes family meant knowing exactly how to hurt each other. “We can’t all have noble Huan’s courage.”

“How  _dare_ -” Celegorm’s rise was arrested by his brother’s hand upon his shoulder. Curufin shook his head, the movement clearly painful, and Maedhros stamped down the urge to send for tea or bundle him off to bed. His brothers were men grown and he was not scolding them over windows broken in their games or a refusal to eat their vegetables.

“That was unkind of me,” he said, without apologising. “You’ve certainly united the realms, albeit in hatred of us. If I could applaud you, be assured I would.”

Curufin smiled his thin, furious smile at that and Maedhros was glad of his silence. He could not talk rings around Curufin as he did Celegorm, who said sullenly, “If we had succeeded you would sing a different song.”

“I like to think I would oppose any plan involving abduction, imprisonment, and the blackmailing of the victim’s kin but perhaps I flatter myself. Morality aside, you did  _not_ succeed.” Maedhros Fëanorion would stop at that. He could see his brothers’ grief in their shadowed eyes and the weary set of their shoulders, and the greater part of him wished to offer what comfort he could for those that they had loved and failed and lost. But he was not just their brother. “You’re both confined to your quarters until I’ve settled matters with our kin.”

That roused his brothers’ ire again. “You aren’t our father to send us to bed without supper,” Celegorm snarled.  

“No indeed. I am your liege lord and it is only for the love I bear you that I haven’t had you whipped.”

There was little enough that could be said after that. Curufin stared him down with bright, cold eyes while Celegorm slumped in his chair, curling in on himself like a wounded animal. Maedhros folded his hands before him - flesh and steel - and wondered, as though he did not know, when they had all gone so badly wrong.


	25. Fingon, Maedhros and a new kind of prosthetic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Prompt? Because I miss your Russingon stories: Fingon and Meadhros invented the dildo. Curufin was the unfortunate elf roped into it's formation.

Maedhros was snoring. He always blamed it on his broken nose but Fingon, who had shared a bed with him since long before Angband, knew that for the lie it was. **  
**

It was funny, the things you came to love, and Fingon might have been content to listen to him snuffle into his pillow all night, but there were more pressing matters at hand. Fingon nudged him gently until the noise stopped and he saw the pale gleam of Maedhros’ eyes in the moonlight.

“I’m leaving in the morning,” Fingon whispered. “It shall be another year at the least before I lie with you again.”

“I’m not two hundred anymore,” Maedhros said sleepily but when Fingon climbed atop him, his arms came up around him without hesitation. 

They kissed, slow and messy, as Maedhros ran a hand over Fingon’s cock and then pressed his fingers up behind his balls to find him still slick and open from the night before.

“Be not gentle,” Fingon said fervently as Maedhros rolled them over and drew his fingers out. “When I’m back at court I want to feel this ache and think of you.”

“You have hundreds of leagues to ride between there and here,” said Maedhros and proceeded to make inconsiderately considerate love to him.

“I hate to be parted from you also,” he said later, fingers carding idly through Fingon’s hair. “But what can be done?”

“I do not miss your words so badly- Ai, not like that!” Fingon cried when Maedhros tugged hard at a braid by way of chastisement. “I meant that you write often enough I do not feel the loss so keenly. It’s your cock that I’m left pining for,” he said and, rather more gently, gave said cock an illustrative tug.

Maedhros laughed and swatted him away. “The hand did not grieve me but if you think to severe  _that_ and bear it off with you-”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t. Ask Curufin to make you another prosthetic.”

It had been a joke, of course, but Maedhros’ expression suddenly went thoughtful. “I’ll think of something,” he said and pressed a kiss to Fingon’s forehead. “Go back to sleep. And keep your knives to yourself.”

* * *

It had been past time Maedhros visited Himlad anyway. To talk taxation, to exclaim over the new pups and yearlings, to drink and hawk and hunt with his brothers as they had in days long past.

Celegorm was very easy to talk to, even easier to bribe if you knew anything of horse and hound. Curufin, alas, was not.

He was at least easy to find. Maedhros observed the proper protocols of forge safety, and waited until Curufin had banked the roaring flames and put aside his files to say; “O, craftiest and most generous of brothers-”

“No.”

“I have not asked,” said Maedhros mildly. Curufin had left the tools upon the bench and turned to face him, which meant the conversation was not over; he expected to be coaxed.

“I’m not going to Nargothrond. Find someone else to flatter that pompous peacock of a cousin into giving us what  _ought_ to be our due as the elder house of Finwë.

“Ah.” Maedhros rearranged his face into a semblance of grim lordship. “You must.”

“Not unless you bind me and throw me over a horse with your own two hands. I hope that won’t present too great a problem for you,” Curufin said, his sneer drawing cracks in the soot upon his face.

“I might forgive you that duty if you do me a favour of a different sort.” Maedhros, ignoring his brother’s glare, picked up a pair of needle nosed pliers and spun them between his fingers.

“If you need someone murdered-”

“I’m perfectly capable of doing my own killing,” said Maedhros, a little wounded at the assumption he had not been considering the pliers’ merits as a weapon in a pinch. “It’s a matter of craft I’ve come to you with.”

“Oh?” It was still charming the way his brother’s eyes lit up at talk of forgework. “Is this about your prosthetic? I have had some thoughts on that count and I’d be glad of the opportunity to experiment.”

“It suits me very well,” said Maedhros, shrugging his shoulder to make the false fingers twitch and flex. “Listen. There’s no proper way to say this; I need you to design a false cock. Varnished wood, perhaps, or ivory if we have any left, but I leave the choice of materials to the expert.”

“Why,” said Curufin, his face gone a careful blank.

“Fingon’s pining.”

“I should have learnt long ago not to ask questions I don’t wish answered,” said Curufin, pressing his palms to his temples. He was still wearing his work gloves and they left even darker smudges of soot upon his skin. “Alright, you win.”

“You’ll do it?”

“I’ll go to Nargothrond.” Curufin tore off his apron and, although he hung it neatly upon the hook, it was with so much violence it was clear he would have rather cast it to the ground.

“Excellent,” said Maedhros, and went off to write to Fingon. That was the Nargothrond issue solved, and he could always go to the dwarves for sex toys.


	26. Fingon, Maedhros and the lending of another hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Since we're on the subject of sex toys...
> 
> Anonymous asked: At the end of [Treat me soft but touch me cool](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8444752), did Mae ever get that fisting?? Was it returned in kind?

“How do we do this?”

“Manual dexterity, patience, and a quart of oil,” said Maedhros, laying a flask containing the latter down upon the sheets. 

“I meant,” Fingon said, with fond weariness. “Who’s sticking their hand in who?”

“Whom.” 

“If you think I’ll listen to a Fëanorian on a matter of linguistics, you are thadly mithtaken.” With weariness only a trifle less fond, Fingon pulled sharply on a lock of Maedhros’ hair. If pedantry was not a flaw on the same scale as a willingness to commit war crimes, it was still more tiresome in the bedroom. “Now, unless you’re angling for my fist in a very different sense…”

Maedhros kissed his brow apologetically. “Let me do it for you. I’ve centuries of selfishness to make up for, and that newly reacquired dexterity to appreciate.”

“You’ll get no arguments from me,” said Fingon, rolling over onto his stomach. Partly to model what not being pointlessly dogmatic looked like, mostly because he always loved a challenge and in a country with no dragons, taking Maedhros’ clenched fist inside him was an appealing change of pace. 

“We lost so many things with the sinking of Beleriand,” Maedhros said sadly, slicking his hand as Fingon piled pillows beneath his hips. 

“The world is lesser for those kingdoms gone beneath the waves.” The fingers that breached him - two to start because Maedhros knew well what he liked - were disconcertingly uncalloused, moving more cautiously than he ever had in Beleriand, and Fingon pressed back, taking them as deep as he could until Maedhros’ free fingers brushed his balls. 

“My father’s treasure,” Maedhros murmured, breath hot against Fingon’s buttocks, tongue teasing at his rim as he added a third finger. Fingon clenched around them, unable to help it as the pads of those fingers brushed his prostate. “And a hundred thousand lesser works. How’s that?”

“Good.” Better when Maedhros wrapped his free hand around Fingon’s cock. Slow strokes, not enough to bring him off, but pleasure dulled the edge of discomfort as Maedhros twisted his fingers, working him open further. “The only home the Sindar and Avari ever knew. The land of their hearts.”

“The fallen houses of the Edain, the Khazad dead for the sake of our petty wars-  Four now?”

“Yes,” Fingon grunted and Maedhros obliged. “Remember that set of glass phalluses from Gabilgathol?” This might have been easier with them, even if cool, unliving glass was no substitute for the warmth and suppleness of his lover’s hand, but they had been beautiful as well and beauty gone from the world should always be mourned. 

“That’s where my thoughts dwelt,” Maedhros agreed sadly. “We’ll not see their like again. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

The slow stretch wasn’t pleasant, was, for all Maedhros’ care, quite close to pain. Fingon relished it, all the same. To brush up against one’s limits was, more often than not, to find they were not -  _quite_  - limits at all. He was panting, and even that gave way to a crack-voiced whimper as he felt Maedhros’ knuckles press against him and, with agonising slowness, breach him. His own hands were fisted, nails pressing into his palms, as the rest of Maedhros’ hand slid into him. 

“All well?” Maedhros’ hand came off his cock to stroke Fingon’s side, trailing oil from his ribs down to his hip, and Fingon would have leaned into it had he been able to move. For a moment, all he could do was shudder, too overwhelmed by the taught stretch of his entrance, the fullness of his bowels to banter, or to form words at all. “Hold a moment,” he managed, and then, as the blinding intensity of sensation subsided a little, “Yes. Move.”

“Fingon,” Maedhros said, very softly, and his hand slid from Fingon’s side to trace where Fingon was stretched around his wrist. It was the lightest of touches but Fingon was so oversensitised he whined again, muscles twitching helplessly. 

In truth, Maedhros did not move much, only enough to find his prostate again, to rub slickly against it as Fingon clenched around him. There was pleasure now, blinding, jolting sparks of it that had him gasping and groaning loudly enough that they were definitely due another strongly worded letter from Finarfin. 

If they’d been doing anything else, Fingon might have been embarrassed that he lasted all of two minutes, but he thought that in light of his other achievements this might be overlooked and collapsed so bonelessly that Maedhros had to collapse with him with a yelp of ‘Careful!’

“So,” he murmured dozily, once Maedhros had extricated his hand and cleaned up the quart of oil the bedsheets had soaked up. “Whomst goes next?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2, by my beloved collaborator [June](http://imindhowwelayinjune.tumblr.com)/[liveoakwithmoss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss/pseuds/LiveOakWithMoss) can be found [here](http://imindhowwelayinjune.tumblr.com/post/174087846828/at-the-end-of-treat-me-soft-but-touch-me-cool-did).


	27. Fingon, Maedhros and a couple of design improvements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: Do Fin and Mae get a new set of sex toys to replace the ones that were drowned?

“Not bad for a first attempt, eh?” Fingon said, twirling the sculpted metal between his fingers. “Not my best work, but that will come with time.”

“One can hope,” Maedhros said, with a significant glance in the direction of their suite. “Only…”

“I know what you’re thinking.” Fingon tossed the plug so that it sparkled in the sunlight and then snatched it from the air. “Too plain.”

“Just a little.”

“Maybe some gold chasing-”

“Platinum. Gold would be too gaudy.”

“Agree to disagree, love. But we can etch all kinds of erotic imagery. Why I have just the scene in mind.”

“Is it you shooting that dragon?” They’d been lovers long enough that Maedhros did not need to guess. 

“Maybe.”

“ _Good,_ ” said Maedhros fervently.

* * *

“I’ve always wanted an excuse to learn,” Fingon said, knotting his braids back beneath a leather cap. There was no place for long hair, however finely adorned, in a glassmith’s workshop. 

There were jokes to be made about breath control, but Maedhros didn’t make them. There was a place for jests in war but learning a new craft was a serious matter. 

* * *

“-And with the addition of carbon or another conductive substance as a powdered filler, silicone rubber can be made electrically conductive while retaining most of its other mechanical properties.”

“I trust we don’t need to explain the implications of this discovery to Tirion’s foremost electrical engineers.”

Of course, Maedhros did not. There were titters around the room, giving way to applause.  Fëanor, sat at the front of the auditorium, wiped away tears of pride with the hem of his sleeve. 

* * *

“I feel like we were…doing something.”

Maedhros looked up from the notes on autonomic self-healing elastomer matrixes Curufin had sent over. “Doing what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It can’t have been that important,” Fingon said, coming around so he could read over his shoulder. “Did he include the torsion-fatigue test results?”


End file.
